Success Story: Tesco Bank

Formed in 1997, Tesco Bank is a retail bank that has been wholly owned by Tesco plc since 2008. It offers a range of current accounts, credit cards, insurance, loans, savings, mortgages and travel products.

Tesco Bank’s vision is to be the bank for people who shop at Tesco, offering retail banking and insurance products to those customers.

The bank engaged CompanyNet to deliver an enterprise-class intranet on Office 365. Its requirements were a great fit for our Kira Cloud intranet accelerator, with ownership of the project shared between Tesco Bank’s Internal Communications and HR teams.

The Challenge

At the core of the challenge was a need for more efficient and effective communications across Tesco Bank. The team wanted to make it easier for colleagues to connect with each other, and make it possible to socialise content more widely across the organisation.

To do this, they needed a controlled content management and publishing solution, with an emphasis on HR
tools, content, and policies. Because content is only useful if you can find it, there was also a need for an improved search function and the implementation of powerful tagging and metadata.

The Solution

To deliver on the core set of requirements in short order, Tesco Bank decided to adopt an ‘MVP’ (minimum viable product) concept to implementing their new intranet. Working through Tesco’s requirements, we put together a solution based on our Kira Cloud intranet accelerator, built on SharePoint Online and augmented by Office 365 internal communications tools including Yammer.

A soft launch to 500 users was initiated three months after the project began, followed by a full rollout to 4,000 users just three months later. The team at Tesco Bank supported the rollout with a comprehensive Communications Plan, which undoubtedly helped guarantee the success of the launch.

“We’re absolutely delighted with what CompanyNet have helped us to deliver. The development, implementation and adoption of our new platform has been incredibly successful.

“Kira has enabled us to deliver a modern, intuitive social intranet that allows us to deliver a personalised experience for Tesco Bank colleagues, and currently sits among the best-in-class of corporate intranets within our industry.”

— Mike Sterry, Senior Internal Communications Manager, Tesco Bank

Immediate Results

The soft launch was a success, with users taking up the new communications tools straight off the bat. One of the biggest success stories for Tesco Bank has been the adoption of Yammer. The Communications Plan incorporated a “Yammer Week”, which saw 1,500 new users welcomed onto the network.

Yammer Week placed a strong emphasis on the impact of the cultural change of introducing new enterprise social tools. The results have been extremely positive:

Senior leaders are regularly “Yamming”, sharing information on Yammer and setting a positive example to colleagues.

Colleague achievements are being recognised and celebrated through the ‘Praise’ tool.

Yammer insights and successes are being shared to make the new environment even more engaging. For example, more than 90% of the top 50 most followed Yammer users have a profile picture.

Examples of how effective Yammer can be as a feedback mechanism are also being shared. For example, staff have used Yammer to provide feedback on the latest issue of Colleague Conference, the bank’s in-house magazine.

As a result of this positive promotion, strong Yammer networks have quickly formed around:

Core business activities such as Insurance Operations and Banking Services

Location-specific groups based in Tesco Bank’s three main staff locations – Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle

Common-interest groups such as Women in Business and the Multicultural Network.

Initiatives such as a ‘Yammer 101 Group’ are up-and-running to engage with under-represented communities within Tesco Bank, and to help newcomers and those who are hesitant to get the most out of Yammer.

Continuous Improvement

With the MVP intranet now well-established, Tesco Bank is fully embracing the idea of ‘continuous improvement’ of its intranet. The organisation has already started using Microsoft PowerApps to model a set of HR forms, and is keen to exploit Microsoft Flow to put more power in the hands of business users, reducing the reliance on IT.

The next wave of activity will focus on the needs of the Operations side of Tesco Bank to meet a set of specific-targeted requirements which are currently being defined.